Former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates Laid To Rest

As the strains of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” echoed in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Daryl Gates was eulogized as a one of a kind police chief today.

Thousands of law enforcement officers and civic leaders from across the state attended an invitation-only funeral for the former police chief, the city’s 49th.

“Daryl was the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Los Angeles Police Department was Daryl,” said LAPD Chief Charlie Beck. He said that Gates was highly esteemed by officers because “he respected the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department …

“He loved them unconditionally and we loved him back the same way, Beck said. He choked up as he recounted promising Gates that he “would care for his beloved department, and I will.

“The chief is dead, long live the Los Angeles Police Department,” Beck concluded.

Services began after gates’ family and dignitaries escorted a hearse, bearing a flag-draped casket, from police headquarters up Bunker Hill to the cathedral. A pair of Los Angeles Fire Department ladders were extended upward from both sides of Temple Street in tribute, outside the modern cathedral.

Gates, who was chief from 1978 to 1992, died of cancer April 16 at his Dana Point home. He was 83.

During his administration at LAPD, Gates’ universal popularity among rank-and-file officers was not as widespread outside Parker Center. Some people saw him as a symbol of repression in parts of the city that erupted into rioting in 1992 when four white police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Gates went under withering pressure from the mayor and City Council for a perceived botched reaction to the Rodney King trial, when four white policemen were acquitted by a Ventura County jury for the videotaped beating of a black motorist.

City council members said Gates’ LAPD was caught unprepared as Los Angeles erupted into rioting while the chief attended a political fundraiser on the Westside. About $1 billion in property was lost amidst four days of lawlessness, and Gates resigned four months later.

And some journalists who covered the police department on a regular basis said Gates was behind car burglaries and spying operations conducted against him.

Gates, personable and outspoken, was credited with professionalizing the department. He started the first police SWAT team and the widely adopted anti- drug program DARE.

And though he worked under one of the nation’s first big-city black mayors — Tom Bradley was also a colleague in the police department as both men moved up the ranks — Gates became a lightning rod for racial politics in his latter years as chief.

He was infamous for over-the-top remarks, once saying that casual drug users should be shot. He also was pilloried for suggesting that black people were somehow physiologically more prone to dying in police chokeholds.

Gates’ career intersected some of the most headline-grabbing events in city history, including the Marilyn Monroe death investigation in 1962, the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 and the riots of 1965 and 1992.